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Thursday, September 27, 2012

Informatica and SSIS offer similar functionality for moving data around your organization, but scratch below the surface and you will find some big differences in how these tools approach common ETL problems. If you are interested in migrating ETL processes to Integration Services, then this webinar will be highly beneficial. We will cover some common patterns found in Informatica, and explain how to get the same results from SSIS. For more advanced Informatica scenarios, we will also cover the use of PragmaticWorks’ Task Factory components to fill in some of the gaps in Integration Services.

The Microsoft SQL Server Distributed Replay feature helps you assess the impact of future SQL Server upgrades. You can also use it to help assess the impact of hardware and operating system upgrades, and SQL Server tuning. Similar to SQL Server Profiler, you can use Distributed Replay to replay a captured trace against an upgraded test environment. Unlike SQL Server Profiler, Distributed Replay is not limited to replaying the workload from a single computer .Distributed Replay offers a more scalable solution than SQL Server Profiler. With Distributed Replay, you can replay a workload from multiple computers and better simulate a mission-critical workload. The Microsoft SQL Server Distributed Replay feature can use multiple computers to replay trace data and simulate a mission-critical workload. Use Distributed Replay for application compatibility testing, performance testing, or capacity planning. In this session we will cover the following: what is SQL Server Distributed Replay, Distributed Replay concepts , benefits of Distributed Replay, when to use Distributed Relay.

Are you aware of the many features SharePoint has to offer the Business Intelligence world? In this session, you'll get an overview of SharePoint 2010 and how to integrate it with your current or new BI infrastructure. We'll discuss the general use of SharePoint for BI and basic setup and installation of the farm, then fly over a completed SharePoint site. You'll tour SharePoint Central Administration, learning how to allow your site to take advantage of many BI features such as PowerPivot, Excel Services, and Reporting Services. With the release of SQL Server 2012, you'll also get a sneak peak at some improvements available in SharePoint for those who want to be on the cutting edge of this growing technology. Forget the slides – this tour will be all demo!

Parameter Sniffing is usually thought of as the bad guy, in association with a performance problem in your database. Contrary to the popular belief, Parameter Sniffing is usually the good guy, continuously working under the hood to help your database applications run faster. However, it can sometimes go wrong, causing severe performance degradation of your queries. In this session we will discuss the workings of Parameter Sniffing and demonstrate how it helps improve the performance of your database applications. We will also explore how Parameter Sniffing can go wrong and its impact. Several ways to fix bad Parameter Sniffing will be demonstrated to help make an appropriate choice for your scenario.

Have you been wondering how you can sit down at work and use Hadoop to make your BI better? Have you thought about what Big Data could mean to your firm? Come watch Adam setup, populate, consume and integrate data from a Big Data Platform into a SQL BI solution Live!

In this webinar you will see how to load a type 1 and type 2 dimension with SSIS and Informatica. Learn the pros and cons of each tool and see them in action. Learn how to use the data flow transforms in SSIS to perform delta load and see the equivalent in Informatica. You will also learn some of the best practices applied in both tools.

Top 10 Features of SQL Server 2012

Microsoft has introduced SQL Server 2012 to the world and it's time for IT professionals to start to come to speed on what's new.

Microsoft has introduced SQL Server 2012 to the world and it's time for IT professionals to start to come to speed on what's new in this highly anticipated version of SQL Server.

1. AlwaysOn Availability Groups -- This feature takes database mirroring to a whole new level. With AlwaysOn, users will be able to fail over multiple databases in groups instead of individually. Also, secondary copies will be readable, and can be used for database backups. The big win is that your DR environment no longer needs to sit idle.

2. Windows Server Core Support -- If you don't know what Windows Server Core is, you may want to come up to speed before Windows 8 (MS is making a push back to the command line for server products). Core is the GUI-less version of Windows that uses DOS and PowerShell for user interaction. It has a much lower footprint (50% less memory and disk space utilization), requires fewer patches, and is more secure than the full install. Starting with SQL 2012, it is supported for SQL Server.

3. Columnstore Indexes -- This a cool new feature that is completely unique to SQL Server. They are special type of read-only index designed to be use with Data Warehouse queries. Basically, data is grouped and stored in a flat, compressed column index, greatly reducing I/O and memory utilization on large queries.

4. User-Defined Server Roles -- DBAs have always had the ability to create custom database role, but never server wide. For example, if the DBA wanted to give a development team read/write access to every database on a shared server, traditionally the only ways to do it were either manually, or using undocumented procedures. Neither of which were good solutions. Now, the DBA can create a role, which has read/write access on every DB on the server, or any other custom server wide role.

5. Enhanced Auditing Features -- Audit is now available in all editions of SQL Server. Additionally, users can define custom audit specifications to write custom events into the audit log. New filtering features give greater flexibility in choosing which events to write to the log.

6. BI Semantic Model -- This is replacing the Analysis Services Unified Dimensional Model (or cubes most people referred to them). It's a hybrid model that allows one data model will support all BI experiences in SQL Server. Additionally, this will allow for some really neat text infographics

7. Sequence Objects -- For those folks who have worked with Oracle, this has been a long requested feature. A sequence is just an object that is a counter -- a good example of it's use would be to increment values in a table, based a trigger. SQL has always had similar functionality with identity columns, but now this is a discrete object.

8. Enhanced PowerShell Support -- Windows and SQL Server admins should definitely start brushing up on their PowerShell scripting skills. Microsoft is driving a lot of development effort into instrumenting all of their server-based products with PowerShell. SQL 2008 gave DBAs some exposure to it, but there are many more in cmdlets in SQL 2012.

9. Distributed Replay -- Once again this is answer to a feature that Oracle released (Real Application Testing). However, and in my opinion where the real value proposition of SQL Server is, in Oracle it is a (very expensive) cost option to Enterprise Edition. With SQL, when you buy your licenses for Enterprise Edition, you get everything. Distributed replay allows you to capture a workload on a production server, and replay it on another machine. This way changes in underlying schemas, support packs, or hardware changes can be tested under production conditions.

10. PowerView -- You may have heard of this under the name "Project Crescent" it is a fairly powerful self-service BI toolkit that allows users to create mash ups of BI reports from all over the Enterprise.

SQL 2012 is a big step forward for Microsoft -- the company is positioning itself to be a leader in availability and in the growing area of big data. As a database professional, I look forward to using SQL 2012 to bring new solutions to my clients.

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Application developers don't care much about how SQL Server executes their queries as long as they get what they want. This session introduces common real case scenarios where developers end up with troublesome queries and bad performance. Explanation is linked to a discussion of alternative effective ways to handle such scenarios.

SQL Server Reporting Services is capable of creating eye-popping visualizations that can be consumed by a variety of business users. The tool has built-in functionality for developers to produce reports that users will find not only functional, but also visually appealing. This whitepaper will focus on how to overcome the gaps that expressions leaves by using custom code. You will also learn many other advantages of using custom code like creating consistency across all reports developed. As you read this paper, you will walk through many examples of using custom code. These examples will emphasize the use of custom code, and will therefore skip topics like creating data sources, datasets and basic report toolbox items.

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Why read this book?

Resilient T-SQL code is code that is designed to last, and to be safely reused by others. The goal of defensive database programming, the goal of this book, is to help you to produce resilient T-SQL code that robustly and gracefully handles cases of unintended use, and is resilient to common changes to the database environment.

Too often as developers, we stop work as soon as our code passes a few basic tests to confirm that it produces the 'right result' in a given use case. We do not stop to consider what other possible ways in which the code might be used in the future, or how our code will respond to common changes to the database environment, such as a change in the database language setting, or a change to the nullability of a table column, and so on.

In the short-term, this approach is attractive; we get things done faster. However, if our code is designed to be used for more than just a few months, then it is very likely that such changes can and will occur, and the inevitable result is broken code or, even worse, code that silently starts to behave differently, or produce different results. When this happens, the integrity of our data is threatened, as is the validity of the reports on which critical business decisions are often based. At this point, months or years later, and long after the original developer has left, begins the painstaking process of troubleshooting and fixing the problem.

Would it not be easier to prevent all this troubleshooting from happening? Would it not be better to spend a little more time and effort during original development, to save considerably more time on troubleshooting, bug fixing, retesting, and redeploying?

This is what defensive programming is all about: we learn what can go wrong with our code, and we proactively apply this knowledge during development. This book is filled with practical, realistic examples of the sorts of problems that beset database programs, including:

Changes in database objects, such as tables, constraints, columns, and stored procedures.

Changes to concurrency and isolation levels.

Upgrades to new versions of SQL Server.

Changes in requirements.

Code reuse.

Problems causing loss of data integrity.

Problems with error handling in T-SQL.

In each case, it demonstrates approaches that will help you understand and enforce (or eliminate) the assumptions on which your solution is based, and to improve its robustness. Ultimately, the book teaches you how to think and develop defensively, and how to proactively identify and eliminate potential vulnerabilities in T-SQL code.

About Me

Working on Microsoft Technology for 9 years with specialization in SQL Server, .Net.Experienced in Software Analysis, Design and Development in Client/Server systems, Data warehousing and Business Intelligence applications for Banking, Manufacturing and Retail domains.